Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons

Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons

Original Text
Wakoski, Diane. Emerald Ice: Selected Poems, 1962-1987. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1988: 143-147.
1The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard,
2as if you were walking on the beach
3and found a diamond
4as big as a shoe;
5as if
6you had just built a wooden table
7and the smell of sawdust was in the air,
8your hands dry and woody;
9as if
10you had eluded
11the man in the dark hat who had been following you
12all week;
13the relief
14of putting your fingers on the keyboard,
15playing the chords of
16Beethoven,
17Bach,
18Chopin
19in an afternoon when I had no one to talk to,
20when the magazine advertisement forms of soft sweaters
21and clean shining Republican middle-class hair
22walked into carpeted houses
23and left me alone
24with bare floors and a few books
25I want to thank my mother
26for working every day
27in a drab office
28in garages and water companies
29cutting the cream out of her coffee at 40
30to lose weight, her heavy body
31writing its delicate bookkeeper's ledgers
32alone, with no man to look at her face,
33her body, her prematurely white hair
34in love
35I want to thank
36my mother for working and always paying for
37my piano lessons
38before she paid the Bank of America loan
39or bought the groceries
40or had our old rattling Ford repaired.
41I was a quiet child,
42afraid of walking into a store alone,
43afraid of the water,
44the sun,
45the dirty weeds in back yards,
46afraid of my mother's bad breath,
47and afraid of my father's occasional visits home,
48knowing he would leave again;
49afraid of not having any money,
50afraid of my clumsy body,
51that I knew
52no one would ever love
53But I played my way
54on the old upright piano
55obtained for $10,
56played my way through fear,
57through ugliness,
58through growing up in a world of dime-store purchases,
59and a desire to love
60a loveless world.
61I played my way through an ugly face
62and lonely afternoons, days, evenings, nights,
63mornings even, empty
64as a rusty coffee can,
65played my way through the rustles of spring
66and wanted everything around me to shimmer like the narrow tide
67on a flat beach at sunset in Southern California,
68I played my way through
69an empty father's hat in my mother's closet
70and a bed she slept on only one side of,
71never wrinkling an inch of
72the other side,
73waiting,
74waiting,
75I played my way through honors in school,
76the only place I could
77talk
78the classroom,
79or at my piano lessons, Mrs. Hillhouse's canary always
80singing the most for my talents,
81as if I had thrown some part of my body away upon entering
82her house
83and was now searching every ivory case
84of the keyboard, slipping my fingers over black
85ridges and around smooth rocks,
86wondering where I had lost my bloody organs,
87or my mouth which sometimes opened
88like a California poppy,
89wide and with contrasts
90beautiful in sweeping fields,
91entirely closed morning and night,
92I played my way from age to age,
93but they all seemed ageless
94or perhaps always
95old and lonely,
96wanting only one thing, surrounded by the dusty bitter-smelling
97leaves of orange trees,
98wanting only to be touched by a man who loved me,
99who would be there every night
100to put his large strong hand over my shoulder,
101whose hips I would wake up against in the morning,
102whose mustaches might brush a face asleep,
103dreaming of pianos that made the sound of Mozart
104and Schubert without demanding
105that life suck everything
106out of you each day,
107without demanding the emptiness
108of a timid little life.
109I want to thank my mother
110for letting me wake her up sometimes at 6 in the morning
111when I practiced my lessons
112and for making sure I had a piano
113to lay my school books down on, every afternoon.
114I haven't touched the piano in 10 years,
115perhaps in fear that what little love I've been able to
116pick, like lint, out of the corners of pockets,
117will get lost,
118slide away,
119into the terribly empty cavern of me
120if I ever open it all the way up again.
121Love is a man
122with a mustache
123gently holding me every night,
124always being there when I need to touch him;
125he could not know the painfully loud
126music from the past that
127his loving stops from pounding, banging,
128battering through my brain,
129which does its best to destroy the precarious gray matter when I
130am alone;
131he does not hear Mrs. Hillhouse's canary singing for me,
132liking the sound of my lesson this week,
133telling me,
134confirming what my teacher says,
135that I have a gift for the piano
136few of her other pupils had.
137When I touch the man
138I love,
139I want to thank my mother for giving me
140piano lessons
141all those years,
142keeping the memory of Beethoven,
143a deaf tortured man,
144in mind;
145of the beauty that can come
146from even an ugly
147past.
Publication Start Year
1970
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire, assisted by Ana Berdinskikh
RPO Edition
2009
Form